Download or read book Zadie Smith written by Tracey Walters and published by Cavendish Square Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zadie Smith made a huge splash in 1997 when, as a college student, she received one of the largest advances in British history for her novel White Teeth. Since then, Smith has published four major novels, a volume of essays, and many short stories. She has become a college professor, an award-winner, and an influential critic of both literature and the current political scene. Readers of Zadie Smith will learn about how insecure and outside of society she felt as a child and young woman, and how that very sense of being an outsider transformed her into the writer of clarity she is today.

Download or read book Short Story written by Paul March-Russell and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new general introduction emphasises the importance of the short story to an understanding of modern fiction.In twenty succinct chapters, the study paints a complete portrait of the short story - its history, culture, aesthetics and economics. European innovators such as Chekhov, Flaubert and Kafka are compared to Irish, New Zealand and British practitioners such as Joyce, Mansfield and Carter as well as writers in the American tradition, from Hawthorne and Poe to Barthelme and Carver.Fresh attention is paid to experimental, postcolonial and popular fiction alongside developments in Anglo-American, Hispanic and European literature. Critical approaches to the short story are debated and reassessed, while discussion of the short story is related to contemporary critical theory. In what promises to be essential reading for students and academics, the study sets out to prove that the short story remains vital to the emerging culture of the twenty-first century.

Download or read book American Literature in Transition 1990 2000 written by Stephen J. Burn and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-28 with total page 635 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in the shadow of the approaching millennium, American literature in the 1990s was beset by bleak announcements of the end of books, the end of postmodernism, and even the end of literature. Yet, as conservative critics marked the century's twilight hours by launching elegies for the conventional canon, American writers proved the continuing vitality of their literature by reinvigorating inherited forms, by adopting and adapting emerging technologies to narrative ends, and by finding new voices that had remained outside that canon for too long. By reading 1990s literature in a sequence of shifting contexts - from independent presses to the AIDS crisis, and from angelology to virtual reality - American Literature in Transition, 1990–2000 provides the fullest map yet of the changing shape of a rich and diverse decade's literary production. It offers new perspectives on the period's well-known landmarks, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, but also overdue recognition to writers such as Ana Castillo, Evan Dara, Steve Erickson, and Carole Maso.

Download or read book Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story written by Bettina Jansen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-08-16 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story offers the first systematic study of black British short story writing, tracing its development from the 1950s to the present with a particular focus on contemporary short stories by Hanif Kureishi, Jackie Kay, Suhayl Saadi, Zadie Smith, and Hari Kunzru. By combining a postcolonial framework of analysis with Jean-Luc Nancy’s deconstructive philosophy of community, the book charts key tendencies in black British short fiction and explores how black British writers use the short story form to combat deeply entrenched notions of community and experiment with non-essentialist alternatives across differences of ethnicity, culture, religion, and nationality.

Download or read book George Saunders written by Philip Coleman and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-03-25 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely volume explores the signal contribution George Saunders has made to the development of the short story form in books ranging from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) to Tenth of December (2013). The book brings together a team of scholars from around the world to explore topics ranging from Saunders’s treatment of work and religion to biopolitics and the limits of the short story form. It also includes an interview with Saunders specially conducted for the volume, and a preliminary bibliography of his published works and critical responses to an expanding and always exciting creative œuvre. Coinciding with the release of the Saunders’ first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), George Saunders: Critical Essays is the first book-length consideration of a major contemporary author’s work. It is essential reading for anyone interested in twenty-first century fiction.

Download or read book Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves written by Mary W. McCampbell and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anyone reading comments in online spaces is often confronted with a collective cultural loss of empathy. This profound loss is directly related to the inability to imagine the life and circumstances of the other. Our malnourished capacity for empathy is connected to an equally malnourished imagination. In order to truly love and welcome others, we need to exercise our imaginations, to see our neighbors more as God sees them than as confined by our own inadequate and ungracious labels. We need stories that can convict us about our own sins of omission or commission, enabling us to see the beautiful, complex world of our neighbors as we look beyond ourselves. In this book, Mary McCampbell looks at how narrative art--whether literature, film, television, or popular music--expands our imaginations and, in so doing, emboldens our ability to love our neighbors as ourselves. The prophetic artists in these pages--Graham Greene, Toni Morrison, and Flannery O'Connor among them--show through the form and content of their narrative craft that in order to love, we must be able to effectively imagine the lives of others. But even though we have these rich opportunities to grow emotionally and spiritually, we have been culturally trained as consumers to treat our practice of reading, watching, and listening as mere acts of consumption. McCampbell instead insists that truly engaging with artists who have the prophetic capacity to create art that wakes us up can jolt us from our typically self-concerned spiritual stupors. She focuses on narrative art as a means of embodiment and an invitation to participation, hospitality, and empathy. Reading, seeing, or listening to the story of someone seemingly different from us can awaken us to the very real spiritual similarities between human beings. The intentionality that it takes to surrender a bit of our own default self-centeredness is an act of spiritual formation. Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves presents a journey through initial self-reflection to a richer, more compassionate look outward, as narrative empowers us to exercise our imaginations for the sake of expanding our capacity for empathy.

Download or read book New Sincerity written by Adam Kelly and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2024-10-08 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The years 1989–2008 were an era of neoliberal hegemony in US politics, economy, and culture. Post*45 scholar Adam Kelly argues that American novelists who began their careers during these years—specifically the post-baby boom generation of writers born between the late 1950s and early 1970s—responded to the times by developing in their fiction an aesthetics of sincerity. How, and in what way, these writers ask, can you mean what you say, and avow what you feel, when what you say and feel can be bought and sold on the market? What is authentic art in a historical moment when the artist has become a model for neoliberal subjectivity rather than its negation? Through six chapters focused on key writers of the period—including Susan Choi, Helen DeWitt, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, George Saunders, Dana Spiotta, Colson Whitehead, and David Foster Wallace—the book explores these central questions while intervening critically in a set of debates in contemporary literary studies concerning aesthetics, economy, gender, race, class, and politics. Offering the capstone articulation of a set of influential arguments made by the author over a decade and more, New Sincerity constitutes a field-defining account of a period that is simultaneously recent and historically bound, and of a generation of writers who continue to shape the literary landscape of the present.

Download or read book Postmodern Postwar and After written by Jason Gladstone and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2016-07 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the past ten years, the field of contemporary American literary studies has changed significantly. Following the turn of the twenty-first century and mounting doubts about the continued explanatory power of the category of “postmodernism,” new organizations have emerged, book series have been launched, journals have been created, and new methodologies, periodizations, and thematics have redefined the field. Postmodern/Postwar—and After aims to be a field-defining book—a sourcebook for the new and emerging critical terrain—that explores the postmodern/postwar period and what comes after. The first section of essays returns to the category of the “post-modern” and argues for the usefulness of key concepts and themes from postmodernism to the study of contemporary literature, or reevaluates postmodernism in light of recent developments in the field and historical and economic changes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These essays take the contemporary abandonments of postmodernism as an occasion to assess the current states of postmodernity. After that, the essays move to address the critical shift away from postmodernism as a description of the present, and toward a new sense of postmodernism as just one category among many that scholars can use to describe the recent past. The final section looks forward and explores the question of what comes after the postwar/postmodern. Taken together, these essays from leading and emerging scholars on the state of twenty-first-century literary studies provide a number of frameworks for approaching contemporary literature as influenced by, yet distinct from, postmodernism. The result is an indispensable guide that seeks to represent and understand the major overhauling of postwar American literary studies that is currently underway.

Download or read book The Global Remapping of American Literature written by Paul Giles and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book charts how the cartographies of American literature as an institutional category have varied radically across different times and places. Arguing that American literature was consolidated as a distinctively nationalist entity only in the wake of the U.S. Civil War, Paul Giles identifies this formation as extending until the beginning of the Reagan presidency in 1981. He contrasts this with the more amorphous boundaries of American culture in the eighteenth century, and with ways in which conditions of globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century have reconfigured the parameters of the subject. In light of these fluctuating conceptions of space, Giles suggests new ways of understanding the shifting territory of American literary history. ranging from Cotton Mather to David Foster Wallace, and from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Zora Neale Hurston. Giles considers why European medievalism and Native American prehistory were crucial to classic nineteenth-century authors such as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. He discusses how twentieth-century technological innovations, such as air travel, affected representations of the national domain in the texts of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. And he analyzes how regional projections of the South and the Pacific Northwest helped to shape the work of writers such as William Gilmore Simms, José Martí, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Gibson. Bringing together literary analysis, political history, and cultural geography, The Global Remapping of American Literature reorients the subject for the transnational era.

Download or read book The Literature of Reconstruction written by Wolfgang Funk and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-03-23 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2016 ESSE Junior Scholar Book Award in Literatures in the English Language The Literature of Reconstruction argues for the term and concept of 'postmillennial reconstruction' to fill the gap left by the decline of postmodernism and deconstruction as useful cultural and literary categories. Wolfgang Funk shows how this notion emerges from the theoretical and philosophical development that led to the demise of postmodernism by relating it to the idea of 'authenticity': immediate experience that eludes direct representation. In addition, he provides a clear formal framework with which to identify and classify the features of 'reconstructive literature' by updating the narratological category of 'metafiction', originally established in the 1980s. Based on Werner Wolf's observation of a 'metareferential turn' in contemporary arts and media, he illustrates how the specific use of metareference results in a renegotiation of the specific patterns of literary communication and claims that this renegotiation can be profitably described with the concept of 'reconstruction'. To substantiate this claim, in the second half of the book Funk discusses narrative texts that illustrate this transition from postmodern deconstruction to postmillennial reconstruction. The analyses take in distinguished and prize-winning writers such as Dave Eggers, Julian Barnes, Jennifer Egan and Jasper Fforde. The broad scope of authors, featuring writers from the US as well as the UK, underlines the fact that the reconstructive tendencies and strategies Funk diagnoses are of universal significance for the intellectual and cultural self-image of the global North.

Download or read book One Man Zeitgeist Dave Eggers Publishing and Publicity written by Caroline D. Hamilton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-10-21 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: >

Download or read book Zadie Smith Introduces The Burned Children of America written by Zadie Smith and published by . This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Showcasing the work of an outstanding literary generation, this collection of short stories (almost all previously unpublished outside America) is the perfect introduction to nineteen of the best young writers in the United States today. We see here new, distinctive voices emerging - offering their readers an America quite different in spirit from that explored by the writers who preceded them. In Zadie Smith’s words; ‘Set apart from the exuberant possibilities of Bellow’s America, the masculine raging of Roth’s, the lyricism of Morrison’s, the America of these stories is more muted, the characters less hysterical in their trajectory, at odds with themselves, uncertain. Why are these writers so sad, so burned - what is the originating trauma? Read The Burned Children of America and make up your own mind.

Download or read book The Bulletin written by and published by . This book was released on 2003-07 with total page 748 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book On Beauty written by Zadie Smith and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-09-13 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for fiction, another bestselling masterwork from the celebrated author of Swing Time and White Teeth "In this sharp, engaging satire, beauty's only skin-deep, but funny cuts to the bone." —Kirkus Reviews Having hit bestseller lists from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle, this wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.

Download or read book The Writers Directory written by and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Granta 97 written by Ian Jack and published by Granta Magazine. This book was released on 2007 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This issue features new work by the 20 writers that Granta's judges - including novelists Edmund White and A.M. Homes - have selected as the most interesting new young vocies in American fiction.

Download or read book Kaapse bibliotekaris written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Issues for Nov. 1957- include section: Accessions. Aanwinste, Sept. 1957-